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Blogging for gun safety reform and changing the conversation about the role of guns and gun violence in our communities. Common sense gun laws and gun safety reform and gun rights are not mutually exclusive.

A broken background check system

The shooting of 26 at a small church in Texas is now history and America has turned to other things. That is the way things go here. The victims and survivors have not forgotten though. If we let this shooting, like all of the other mass shootings and every day shootings go the way of Wikipedia and move on, we can expect to see many more.

What will we do about saving lives land preventing shootings?

We are not helpless to fix this national public health epidemic. Some laws are broken and need to be fixed and we need some new laws that, in this political atmosphere are unlikely to be passed.

Our background check system for gun purchases is broken. There is absolutely no rational reason not to require a background check on every single gun sale. We require them for adopting a pet, for a whole lot of other important jobs and responsibilities. But because the corporate gun lobby has co-opted any common sense discussion about reforms to our gun policy and gun culture, we have allowed people to buy guns without background checks all over our country.

Roof was able to buy the weapon after the investigator assigned to complete his background check wasn’t able to find his police record, which contained a confession for drug possession. Under federal law, NICS has three business days to finish vetting a gun buyer, or the sale can proceed. When the deadline expired with his background check still incomplete, Roof got his gun.

Last summer, the story of Roof’s dead-end background check helped expose a loophole that annually allows upwards of 3,000 persons deemed too risky to own a gun to acquire a firearm via so-called “default proceed” sales.

And so, we see the results every day. There really are hardly words to describe the shooting in a small church in the small Texas town of Sutherland, Texas. How can one family lose 8 people at once in a shooting? How can a shooter shoot and kill and 18 month old baby?

Devin Patrick Kelley’s June 2012 escape from Peak Behavioral Health Systems in New Mexico occurred months after he was accused of abusing his ex-wife and her child, according to an El Paso Police Department report obtained by CNN affiliate KVIA on Tuesday.

Kelley was picked up after the Santa Teresa, New Mexico, facility listed him as missing. The documents said officers had been warned that Kelley was a danger to himself and others and that he had sneaked firearms onto Holloman Air Force Base, where he had reportedly threatened his commanders.

All of this and he was able to buy guns.

This is America. This is not normal or inevitable. This is a public health epidemic of huge proportions. Americans and Texans are angry, sad, upset, shocked,

There is no doubt that we need to make some serious changes and make it harder for certain people to get guns. It wouldn’t hurt law abiding citizens if it was harder for them to get a gun either for the good of the whole and for saving lives. If people go through background checks and lengthy processes for other things in their lives, they can do the same to acquire a gun. This is a no brainer and the majority concur.